Dee Boersma Quotations

Whenever you do science it's important to know individuals. And that means you have to distinguish one from another, just like we give names to people we have to be able to give names to penguins. And we often do that with bands.

Nobody has really done a thorough review to characterize the recovery plans.

All bands are not created equal. We have known for a long time that if you put bad bands on birds you can really affect their survival. Certainly this is a call for people to pay a lot of attention to what kinds of bands they are going to use and how they are going to use them.

It's been going on for decades and it's having a long-term negative effect on wildlife. Penguins can live a long time with oil, but that's not true of most seabirds. Our findings appear to be just the tip of the iceberg.

This is laying the groundwork of future, more extensive review of the recovery planning process.

The islands were very lush, green and verdant, which is unusual. It's like the ocean is the desert right now and the land is the garden. It's usually the other way around.

I'm certainly not at all convinced that the Galapagos penguin is going to go extinct because of this. But I am concerned that the numbers are going to become increasingly low, and we know that with smaller populations they're just more vulnerable to extinction.

By gathering this detailed history of recovery plans, we expect we'll be able to say quite a bit about how they've evolved over time and their effectiveness.